Miscellany

The increasing spread of economic capability and interdependence makes it less likely than ever that anyone will be able to exert dominance over anyone else. The idea that Japan, for instance, a small island highly dependent on raw materials coming in over the high seas, could exert hostile economic dominance on any major country seems to me fanciful-even if Japanese per-capita GNP should become the highest in the world.

-Herbert Stein, Wall Street Journal

GREEN GRABER WAITS FOR THE RIGHT VIRUS

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.

I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line-at about a billion years ago, maybe half that-we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague on ourselves and upon the Earth.

It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil fuel consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

-David M. Graber, Los Angeles Times

HAS ANYONE CALLED GORBY “TRICKY MIK?”

The same Nixon who once scorned the press actually bantered with a horde of reporters.

When a tongue-tied reporter mistakenly addressed him as “Mr. Gorbachev,” Nixon quipped, “I’ve been called worse.”

–Los Angeles Times

THAT SHOULDN’T STOP THEM

If the demise of communism truly does represent the end of history, the explain the phenomenon of Jennifer Casolo? The arrest of the 28-year-old Ms. Casolo last November-when the Salvadoran army raided [her] house and dug up a backyard arsenal of more than 100 mortar shells, 200 dynamite sticks and 20,000 bullets-caused an international uproar.

Accuracy in Media, a lobbying group dedicated to exposing left-wing bias in the press, has made a crusade of discrediting the well-armed Ms. Casolo. “Outside of this girl,” comments a Houston source, “there’s not much of a left wing remaining for the press to be biased toward.”

-Wall Street Journal

FOR $ 12.95 YOU GET LETTUCE AND TOMATOES

Significant East Side signage spotted by Pelda B. Levey in front of Mumbles, a restaurant on [New York City’s] upper Third Avenue:

IVANA BURGER $3.00

MARLA BURGER $7.95

DONALD BURGER $12.95

-New York Times

BIG MACSKI

There is one bright ray of hope in perestroika. Pravda announced that 20 McDonald’s restaurants are soon to be opened in Moscow. The only question is, will 20 be enough?

-Chronicles

OUR CANDIDATES FOR AD CLUNKER OF THE YEAR

Camel cigarettes launched its Old Joe Camel ad campaign with a large sign-1.5 miles of neon, 8.5 miles of wiring-in New York‘s Times Square. Problem was that mistakenly the Camel Lights were protruding from the Camel Filters pack and vice versa. Not to worry: The bands around the cigarettes were made of Velcro so they could be moved to the appropriate protruding butt.

Scatology’s back: After Mike Schmidt, of baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies, retired, Nike ran a print ad reading, in large black letters on a white background: NO SCHMIDT. Obviously a clever play on words. Scatology’s back.

Ligget Group began a campaign for its Pyramid brand of cigarettes without a look back into history. Then a reader wrote to Advertising Age, pointing out that pyramids were used as tombs for the pharaohs. Cough.

-Jeffrey L. Seglin, The Year In Business

BLUNTNESS COUNTS

USA TODAY: Nissan is making a big splash with its new Infiniti commercials. Do you think they’re effective?

IACOCCA: Well, they brainwash you with rocks and trees…

USA TODAY: [Will you] run for President? IACOCCA: No. Between the bureaucracy and the Congress and the press, I don’t need it. I probably would go bananas. The first year, I would want to shoot myself.

-Excerpts from an interview with Chrysler Chairman and CEO Lee Iacocca, USA Today

SCORNED CANDIDATE

“Walter Mondale, six months after his defeat in 1984, asked me ‘How long after you lost 49 states did it quit hurting?’ ” Mr. McGovern recalls. The 1972 candidate says he replied, “I’ll let you know when.”